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Laura Tyson: Inside America's Tax Battle

Nov 27, 2012

Former Council of Economic Advisers Chair and CRFB Board Member Laura Tyson says that it has become clear that increased revenues are needed along with spending cuts in a comprehensive plan. But there is still some disagreement about how to get that revenue.

Tyson argues that tax reform needs to be considered, but pursuit of reform should not stall attempts to repeal the fiscal cliff given the likelihood of falling into another recession. The solution in the interim might be a temporary limit on deductions for high income earners, similar to what we discussed in a recent paper. Tyson writes:

Republicans have proposed tax reforms in lieu of rate hikes on high-income taxpayers to raise revenues for deficit reduction. Obama has signaled that he is willing to consider this approach, provided it increases tax revenues from the top 2-3% by at least the same amount as higher rates while protecting other taxpayers.

The federal tax system is certainly in need of reform. Tax expenditures – which include all deductions, credits, and loopholes – account for about 8% of GDP. Indeed, the US tax code is riddled with special preferences and contains large differences in effective tax rates across individuals and economic activities. These differences distort decisions about investment allocation and financing. Reforms that made the tax system simpler, fairer, and less distortionary would have a beneficial effect on economic growth, although economists concede that the size of this effect is uncertain and impossible to quantify.

Because tax expenditures are so large, limiting them could raise a significant amount of additional revenue that could be used both for deficit reduction and to finance across-the-board cuts in income-tax rates. Analysis of the Simpson-Bowles and Domenici-Rivlin deficit-reduction plans by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center confirms that this approach is arithmetically feasible. Reducing large regressive tax expenditures like preferential tax rates for capital gains and dividends and deductions for state and local taxes, and replacing deductions with progressive tax credits, could generate enough revenue to finance rate cuts for all taxpayers, increase the tax code’s overall progressivity, and contribute meaningfully to deficit reduction.

But the odds of such an outcome are very low: what is arithmetically feasible is unlikely to be politically possible. Efforts to cap popular tax expenditures will encounter strong opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike. Nonetheless, some tax reforms are likely to be a key component of a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal, because they provide Republicans who oppose increases in tax rates for high-income taxpayers with an ideologically preferable way to increase revenue from them.

Unfortunately, it will take time to negotiate tax reforms – more time than remains until the end of the year, when the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire for all taxpayers. But there is still time to negotiate an agreement that extends these cuts for the bottom 98%, and that contains temporary measures to cap deductions and credits for high-income taxpayers in 2013. Such an agreement could help to break the political impasse over whether and how much these taxpayers’ rates should rise next year, thereby preventing the US from falling over the fiscal cliff and back into recession.